My daughter used to wear a rainbow tutu everywhere. To school, the masjid, the grocery store, to bed some nights if I let her. She loved rainbows. Rainbow was her favorite color.
That year, I was volunteering in her preschool classroom. One of her classmates had two moms. The school district’s curriculum was building a foundation around lgbtq, and somewhere in the middle of that year, the rainbow stopped being just a rainbow. It became a symbol. My daughter noticed, and without me saying a single word to her about it, she stopped wearing the tutu.
She was four.
I didn’t talk to her about sexuality or family structure or anything close to it. She didn’t need me to. She absorbed the shift through her classroom, her teacher, her peers, and made a decision on her own that something, her rainbow unicorn princess imaginary world, something that she loved meant something else. That’s the part that stayed with me. The fact that a four-year-old could feel a change like that before she had any words for what it was.
It doesn’t stop at preschool
By the later years of elementary school, the kids in my house were fluent in celebrity relationship drama. Who broke up with who, who cheated, who’s toxic, who’s back together. Ten and eleven year-olds narrating adult relationship patterns like sports commentary, because that’s what’s showing up in every group chat and recommended video.
By middle school, I watched something worse. Kids joking about the Epstein files. Laughing. Not because they’re cruel, but because they have no framework for what they’re looking at. Horrific, documented abuse of children, reduced to a meme format because that’s the only language the algorithm taught them to process hard things in.
It’s not a matter of if
None of this is hypothetical for your family. It’s already reached your child in some form or another, probably sooner than you were expecting. Not through a stranger. Through a classroom, a group chat, a “recommended for you” page, a conversation at a party that you weren’t in the room for. The exposure rarely looks like the thing you were likely bracing yourself for; it looks ordinary. That’s what makes it so hard to catch.
What fitrah means here
The Prophet (pbuh) said that every child is born upon the fitrah, upon that pure, God-given nature, and it’s what happens around them afterward that shapes what they become.
As reported by Abu Huraira,
“Every child is born with a true faith of Islam, but his parents convert him to Judaism, Christianity, or Magianism, as an animal delivers a perfect baby animal. Do you find it mutilated?”
(Sahih al-Bukhari 1359)
Scholars have long understood that hadith to be about far more than religious labels handed down at birth. It’s about the shaping power of the environment a child grows up in. Parents were always understood to be the primary shapers of that fitrah. But now, many other hands are now reaching for it before we even know they’re there.
You didn’t do this
That’s not a reason to panic, nor is it a reason to blame yourself for what your child has already seen and been exposed to. The world did that on its own, and it’s not slowing down to ask for your permission. But it is a reason to stop assuming that you have more time than you really do. The window where you’re the only voice shaping your child’s understanding of the world closed earlier than any of us were told it would.
Being a parent is a lot like letting your heart walk around outside your body and watching it fend for itself. You can’t be there for every exposure. You can’t filter every classroom, every group chat, every screen your child glances at over a friend’s shoulder. That was never in your control, even when it felt like it was.
What is in your control is the space you build at home. Not a space where you swoop in with the right answer the very second that something uncomfortable comes up, but a space safe enough that your child brings you their real questions instead of googling them or asking a friend. That’s where you get to make sure they really understand what your family believes and why, so when they’re exposed to something that doesn’t align with it, they have something solid to measure it against instead of just absorbing it.
If you want to have these conversations but don’t know where to start, or what to say if they don’t go as planned, I’ll be sending out scripts for each age group this Friday.
If you haven’t upgraded yet, now is the time.
You can lock-in a permanent 20% discount off the annual plan for as long as you choose to be here.
But hurry, this offer ends at the end of this month, August 31st, 2026.
Where we go from here
This month is about naming what’s happening so you know exactly how to respond when it appears in your home, which it will.
Next week I’ll look at what this kind of early exposure does to a developing brain, and why the Islamic concept of protecting the fitrah isn’t just a nice phrase, it’s a real, urgent responsibility.
If this month has been useful to you, I’d love for you to stick around. Every Friday, paid subscribers get the exact scripts I use with my own kids and the ones I give my clients, for moments just like these, broken down by age so you’re never guessing what to actually say in the moment. Your support is honestly what lets me keep doing this work.
You’re doing better than you think.
With du’a,
Gulnaz, Halal Parenting
That’s exactly what we’re getting into this Friday in This Week At Home. Real scripts for how to handle it when you and your spouse disagree in the moment, what to say to each other afterward, and how to repair it with your child if the damage is already done, broken down for every age from toddlers to teens. This is the part that actually changes how your house runs, and it’s only for paid subscribers.
If you haven’t upgraded yet, now is the time. You can lock-in a permanent 20% discount off the annual plan for as long as you choose to be here.
But hurry, this offer ends at the end of this month, August 31st, 2026.